8 Highlights At The Seedly Personal Finance SG Meetup

Passionate about helping people make smarter financial decisions. You can contribute your thoughts like Kenneth here.

3 min read

Last week, we had our first Seedly meetup at the Shopback office. We invited SGBudgetBabe together with myself Kenneth, from the Seedly blog to share on the basics of Personal Finance 101 for working adults. Towards the end, we had a panel discussion with Tai Zhi from AutoWealth and Rachel from StashAway who shared more on their take on Robo Advisors in Singapore.

Here is a wrap up on the top 8 highlights the speakers shared during the event, be sure to attend the next one and stay informed in our Seedly Personal Finance Community!

8 Meetup Highlights

1) Your Personal Finance as a football team lineup

The concept is simple to understand and is advocated by not only many financial advisors, but also many blogs globally.

Goalkeeper: Insurance (Your last safety net)

Defenders: Cash (Emergency funds and opportunity funds)

Midfielders: Bonds, Fixed Deposits (Can cash out on shorter notice, but also can give reasonable returns)

5) Try to stay out of debt

Budgetbabe shared an example of a Credit Card debt of $1k which charged 24% p.a of interest. In fact, in just one year, the fees you would have to payback is NOT just $1,240 but instead a total of more than $2,000 (youtube link) due to late fees and interest on late fees etc. Here are the key tips.

6) A bond as a midfield player

Midfield players in football both defend and attack. Essentially, they have both purposes and a Bond, which is a type of debt instrument where an investor loans money to an entity behaves in such a manner. Generally, the returns on bonds are not amazing but are usually more stable over economic cycles.

Defend: If you redeem your bond earlier, you get an interest rate around 1.15% p.a

Attack: Towards a later date, your interest rate is around 2 – 3% p.a

7) A typical working adult investment strategy

Given the time-starved adult, he would take on a more passive approach to his investment beliefs.

Active Funds (Mutual funds) vs Exchange Traded Funds: ETFs wins because you would rather match the index returns rather than invest in managed funds with higher costs and may not beat the market benchmark

One simple way to start on this track would be to jump on the STI ETF bandwagon with one of your online bank accounts which you can easily setup in just under 10 minutes.

8) Robo-Advisors seem a pretty viable solution

Robo-Advisors essentially offer the promise of Low-cost Diversified Passive Investing and it was heavily discussed in the sharing session. Essentially they are for the time-starved working adults who do not want to pay high fees to fund managers from banks etc. You can refer more on an in-depth comparison between StashAway vs AutoWealth vs Smartly.

Low Cost: Usually 0.5% to 1% fees are charged for total amount managed (because they are run by models and algorithms behind instead of fund managers, hence the word ‘Robo’)

Diversified: Usually put into a basket of Global Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) which exposes the fund to the global economy in different sectors in some form of a mix of equities and bonds. Some of these ETFs are not available to retail investors

Passive Investing: A longer-term approach to growing wealth rather than high-frequency trading and taking short-term positions

Conclusion: Great content, Great food, Great community!

In all, I think the response was really well received and many attendees actually shared with us on their feedback from the event. We look forward to the next one where we aim to further help more people make smarter financial decisions in their daily lives.